


A Cloud As Yet No Bigger Than a Man's Hand

by Lavanya_Six



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-20
Updated: 2011-08-20
Packaged: 2017-10-22 21:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanya_Six/pseuds/Lavanya_Six
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Earth, Air, Fire, and Water all look the same under a good coat of soot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cloud As Yet No Bigger Than a Man's Hand

You could tell outsiders by their walk. They didn't slump their shoulders when a guardsman passed by, or avert their eyes. Acting like that never stopped striking Jin as strange.

Most of her life, she'd tried not to attract attention from guardsmen dressed in conical hats and stone gloves. Then for a little while it was skull-faced men in red armor. After the comet, the guards wore green again but went barehanded. She walked the same way past all of them. Everyone who belonged in Ba Sing Se did.

Sometimes, Jin struggled to remember why people had fought and died so the guards she avoided weren't dressed in red.

* * *

During the occupation, the enemy had started frantically constructing hundreds of new factories and mills. Jin had made a little coin serving tea to the forced labor brigades. In the months after the war, His Majesty saw that the factories were finished. Jin heard the same jokes by the workers about their overseers.

She soon found work inside one of the new steel mills. Jin's small hands could reach into machinery that a man's hands couldn't. The floor was a horrible place to be: the broiling air, the smoke, the men pinching her behind. It was worth it, though. Three month's pay was worth more than what she made in a year's work bussing tables at Pao's Family Tea Shop.

Just one more year and she'd have enough money to be safe a long time. Maybe even to move up to the Middle Ring and find an apprenticeship!

* * *

That winter, Mother got sick.

* * *

When Mushi's invitation came, Jin had to refuse. She couldn't miss a day of work. They'd fire her and just hire one of the million women wanting her wage. Her manager didn't care about her, just her little hands. If they fired her, Jin's family would have to choose between Mother's medicine or paying the rent.

When a second invitation from Mushi came, it was presented by her floor manager.

"I know people," Mushi later told her.

Before their reunion, Jin scrubbed her hands until her flesh was raw and almost bleeding. Still, grime outlined her fingernails, bringing out every tiny vein of her many fresh callouses. Whenever she set down her impossibly delicate teacup that day, paranoia had Jin checking it for smudged fingerprints.

* * *

The skies were impossibly blue in the Upper Ring. The greenery hurt her eyes, it was so bright under the sunlight. The silence startled her too, but not as much as the way all the nobles walked like they had steel poles instead of spines. Why that really bothered her didn't occur to Jin until the trip home.

There were no guards in the Upper Ring.

* * *

One night, as she was ending her shift, a coworker pressed a pamphlet into her hand. Jin, exhausted, took it automatically. It wasn't until she boarded the monorail that Jin remembered she even had it. The front cover featured a single word: EQUALITY.

Curious, Jin peeled open the first page.

It began:

 __

 _The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles..._


End file.
